Posted Wed Jan 10, 2018 at 09:45 PM PST by Steven Cohen
HDR10+ is set to arrive on the company's previously released 4K players.
Samsung has confirmed plans to add HDR10+ support to its currently available lineup of 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray players. The models set to receive the update include the UBD-M9500, UBD-M8500, and the UBD-M7500.
An exact release date for the update has not been announced yet, but the firmware is expected to arrive in the first half of 2018. And though the upgrade will enable HDR10+ disc playback from upcoming Ultra HD Blu-ray releases, it's not clear yet whether any of the players' internal streaming apps will also get HDR10+ support.
HDR10+ is a new dynamic metadata HDR format that allows a compatible display to adjust brightness levels, color saturation, and contrast on a scene-by-scene or even frame-by-frame basis, producing images that are closer to the director's intent. The previous HDR10 standard was limited to static metadata, which could only offer a fixed picture enhancement across an entire piece of content. This could lead to inconsistent HDR quality in certain scenes, especially if a movie has an overall bright color palette mixed in with a few dimly lit sequences. The addition of dynamic metadata will now make the new HDR10+ format more in line with the competing Dolby Vision HDR process, which already incorporates dynamic metadata along with higher specs for max color and brightness performance compared to HDR10.
And in addition to the upcoming firmware update, Samsung also revealed that HDR10+ will be able to work over the current HDMI 2.0 spec thanks to a process called "Infoframe." Though HDR10 dynamic metadata should only technically be possible over the new HDMI 2.1 spec, Infoframes allow for the addition of 24KB of metadata to a standard HDR10 encode over HDMI 2.0. Samsung already has the process working, but the method is still being finalized and is pending approval from the company's partners.
Source: Samsung
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